FORGIVE ME PAST: Escape!

Calling him was the only way, but after trying thrice without an answer, and nurse Peace’s number being busy, I gave up. The last thing I could do was to leave him warning and repenting messages, concerning the surfacing problems and my departure without him, respectively, before throwing away my sim card. As I nimbled to the main road, I finally thought of a place I could hide—just in case things should get tough—and alay my anxiety from.

It’s funny how time separates branches of the same tree: it dictates which will be used to make a table, which will be used as firewood, and so on. From the tree of higher education I was pursuing at The Royal Institute of Tech, there was an unfortunate branch like me. It didn’t suffer a hostile furnace as mine, but all the same, wasn’t used for making furniture that would at least be treasured.

It was also scotching in fires of its own, that the knowledge it had acquired from the institute didn’t help it that much—it was at the world’s end, in the village, pursuing a degree in suffering and unrewarding toiling. The ‘branch’s’ name was Dickson. He was an old friend and classmate through my secondary and the institute levels. At this moment, there was no better place to hide than at his shack in Sindo village, miles away from Bwaise.

Talking about Dickson, the fella was an optimist, a believer. Basing on the plans and the prodigious faith he had, he was fit and ‘qualified’ to be the most successful man in Uganda, but fate always follows a different arrangement. After completing his diploma, he failed to get a good job in the city. The world tossed him here and there until everything seemed useless to him. He then decided to return to the village and live a simple life, with achievable goals, giving up all the big dreams he had. We lost contact, just as all stories go, but he’d told me about his location before our ties weakened.

Of course I didn’t narrate the whole of my story to Dickson when we met again after such a long time, no, but I agreed with him concerning the deadly jabs of life. He was more than willing to shelter me, given my assistance at his movie library. To me, that was heaven; another chance to start life afresh, simpler and purer. For days, after settling in, I tried reaching both Rachael and Gerald, using Dickson’s phone, but their numbers couldn’t be reached. It seemed to me that I was the only one living life anew.

One day, after a thousand tries, Rachael’s number was finally on! The ringer on the other side generated a warm smile on my face, disbelief and a couple of extra heartbeats. All the words, in all languages I knew, escaped my memory when her seraphic voice sang “hello”. After a few seconds, with my only reply being silence, Rachael cut off the call. I had to call again, and this time I spoke first, my sentences cruded with stammer. The greetings were successful but the moment I told her who I was, Rachael immediately cut off the call!

She never picked up again for the following one week! That made me lose my mind. I mean, why would she deliberately avoid talking to me? I had thought she would instead be happy.—There was no other that could answer that question but her. I made up my mind to return to Kampala, after being in Sindo for almost four months, to look for Rachael. Dickson was supportive, obviously, because I hadn’t told him about the murders. On one morning, the waking sun found me in a taxi to Kampala.

The city hadn’t changed a bit: all individuals in the taxi park were already journeying the day, like robots, programmed, doing the things they’d done the day before, weeks back and months back, in the hunt for money. Vendors were vending, hawkers were hawking, cargo lifters were lifting cargo, and so forth. The sun was blazing, milking all the sweat it could from their worn-out bodies. I was like a newbie, about to join in the frenzy of such hustles… Well, were I?

On the contrary, my intentions were clearly different: I’d returned to hunt for Rachael, and maybe, also find out what Gerald was up to—if things hadn’t gone as I’d thought they would. The former was my life, and the latter, the reason as to why I had a life. I had a lot of questions to ask Rachael but for Gerald’s case, I had a lot of answers I owed him. I had come with a bag of faith, guts and hope, for my success—and well-being, for that matter—wasn’t guaranteed.

Unlike Rachael’s, I didn’t have Gerald’s number in my head. I know it sounds frivolous of me but I had never thought things would become that complicated; I’m not a soothsayer. Rachael was a special case because she was—and still is—the love of my life, and I had everything concerning her at my fingertips. On her account, I was preparing for the worst, for I was the darkness and she was the light, and basing on most teachings, preferably biblical ones, darkness and light can never be together.

My first destination was Elen’s clinic. I didn’t hunt for Rachael first because I knew it would take forever. Gerald’s would be easier, and lesser important of the two, to kill hours and days on it. It was a Monday and nurse Peace’s boss was there, so I had to be professional. We had a brief conversation in which she informed me that Gerald had left hurriedly with Leila the day I last came, even before being cleared. I thanked her for all she’d done for him and cleared the debt of 20,000shs.

My attempt to return and see what happened to our abode was sabotaged by the WANTED posters, on two consecutive electric poles, that bore my name and a sketched face that looked somewhat like mine! I immediately made a turn to take my presence elsewhere. Having posters that bore my name had but one deduction: Gerald had been arrested, and our abode, preserved as a hall of evidence! Being in such a place would be deliberately assassinating my freedom.

Before beginning the blind search for Rachael, I first rented a room in Katanga slum, near Wandegeya town, near Makerere University. The rentals there were very cheap and guaranteed my identity as being incognito. Just like Bwaise, or even worse, Katanga was a diseased region, full of lowlifes and lawbreakers, just like me and my recent gang. It was just the place I belonged. I made strategies and ways on how to hunt for Rachael the moment I moved in the single-roomed inhuman seven-by-seven-by-seven feet shack.

I’d planned to go to her hostel, campus and everywhere connected to those places, and to ask for anyone connected to her. I hastened to the main road in Wandegeya, but before I crossed it, something made me frosty! I saw someone who resembled Rachael identically! At a distance, the young lady seemed to merely resemble her but as the bodaboda, on which she was, drew closer, I proved that she was my Rachael! She saw me as well. We interlocked eyes before she looked away like she hadn’t recognized me!

As the bodaboda drew more closer, I shouted her name but she didn’t even turn to look at me again. She had a swollen belly! She was pregnant! I didn’t know how to measure the maturity of the pregnancies but she was about four months pregnant! She tried to hide it with the jumper she was putting on but I’d seen it already. At first I thought I was having delusions or hallucinations but no, this was all real!

I called her name louder and louder as the bodaboda bypassed me, but all was in vain. Everyone around was looking at me, some murmuring, perhaps suggesting that I needed psychiatric attention. My heart was drumming in my chest, my eyes sweating, and my feet, too spongy to put up an effort of chasing the bodaboda. It was as though I had seen a ghost or worse. Why, and how, was she pregnant? My mind had got a new signature—the question mark.

As my whole being was still contemplating on what my eyes had seen, the unexplainable state I was in was interrupted by a piercing stare from a policewoman at the minor police post beside the road. She seemed to recognize me somehow. I didn’t wait to prove it—I almost flew, in an attempt to run and escape from her ‘claws’. As soon as I reacted in such a manner, she alerted her male partner who persued me in a sprint contest into the slum.